Burying carbon dioxide in underground saline aquifers

This paper examines the many facets of the CCS issue – the science and technology of carbon capture and sequestration, the challenges of scale, the politics of ‘business as usual’ and ‘clean coal’ and the risks associated with CCS. [...] In each of these projects, the capture of the CO2 is not performed at a coal-fired plant but is part of the routine process of stripping excess CO2 during the production of natural or synthetic gas. [...] Canada possesses the technology, geology, and expertise to be a world leader in the development and implementation of CCS technology.”23 Snyder went on to explain that government has to take the financial risk because “as with any new environmental technology a financial gap exists between the cost of a plant with CCS and what would otherwise be built to produce the same industrial outputs.”24. [...] The Massachusetts Institute of Technology report on the Future of Coal tried to quantify the immensity of the scale: “If 60% of the CO2 produced from U. S. coal-based power generation were to be captured and compressed to a liquid for geologic sequestration, its volume would about equal the total U. S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day.”37 On a global context, sequestering one billio [...] This cost could be reduced to $103 US a megawatt-hour using more advanced integrated gasification combined cycle technology and engineers are hoping to drop the price even further.50 "[Carbon capture] costs half again as much as the cost of the plant, and physically, you have to double the amount of real estate of the plant to retrofit it on the back of a plant that already exists," says Charlie B